Report Claims Touch ID’s Accuracy Degrades Over Time

If there’s one drawback to fingerprint sensors, at least in the past, is that it tends to degrade quickly overtime, meaning that after a certain amount of time, it will fail to real fingerprints, ultimately rendering the technology useless. Apple claims to have solved that problem with Touch ID by using sapphire to protect the sensor, but it seems that there have been a smattering of reports which claims that Touch ID is no longer able to accurately read fingerprints after a month or so.

This is according to tech blogger, Dr. Drang, who claims that he had to reset Touch ID every month or so to teach it to read his fingerprints all over again. According to him, he believes that Touch ID could be polluting its data by updating the initial scan with additional scans, and overtime the image that is stored will no longer resemble those of your fingerprints, hence the need to reset it every now and then. John Gruber at Daring Fireball semi-agrees with Drang’s findings, claiming that he has had several readers ask him about it recently, although he himself did not find any drop-off in accuracy.

What do you guys think? Any of our readers experience a drop-off in accuracy with Touch ID on the iPhone 5s?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: iPhone 5S, touch id